I have, though, been thinking about why I dislike its approach so much; it is, I fear, yet again another example of our old friend well-intentioned managerialism, at work. The way I look at the question is this; by and large, most people are tolerant by default. That is, in most counties — and Britain, thank God, is certainly one of them — people are really primarily interested in getting on with their own lives in their own way and aren’t particularly bothered one way or the other about other people might be doing so long as it doesn’t adversely affect them too much. We’re all of us members of umpteen overlapping, and at times conflicting, ‘communities’ — the area in which we live, our families, our friends, our colleagues, our partner’s family (oh, dear God… quote from my late wife, shortly before she died — ‘at least I’ll never have to put up with my brother again, and you won’t have to, either, after the funeral’ — a somewhat unchristian remark, but people like Anna’s brother were the reason the word ‘nincompoop’ was invented), other members of social, political or religious organisations to which we may belong . None of them define us; and through our experience of belonging to them, we’re all of us perfectly well able to deal with people we might not particularly like or who seem to us rather odd (my sometime brother in law, for example).

If there’s someone you don’t like, or who doesn’t like you, you either avoid them or, if circumstances — work, in particular — throw you together, most of us learn quite early on how to deal with such situations. And we do because we’re sensible adults who’ve learned how to conduct our lives so we can concentrate on pursuing, in our own ways, those ends that seem important to us, with a minimum of frustration. When conflicts arise, as inevitably they do, they’re normally between individuals, not communities — though they might well be between particular individuals who, for their own motives (usually political and financial) claim to speak ‘on behalf of’ particular communities.

Now, it seems to me that, in this fallen world of ours, conflicts between individuals are inevitable. Sometimes they can be solved by more or less amicable negotiation, but sometimes they can’t and that’s when the civil or criminal law comes into play. But for government to say, ‘conflict is undesirable so we’ll do our best to ensure it never arises’ is not only deluded; it’s downright dangerous.

Totalitarian is a much misused term, to my mind; a mere synonym for ‘repressive’. As I understand it, it was originally favoured by the Italian fascists, who meant by it something rather different. Their complaint about the existing political parties was that they represented sectional and regional interests — capital, labour, agriculture, various regions of Italy and so on. No one, complained Mussolini and his comrades, would speak for the whole, the totality, of Italian society — so that’s where they came in. The fasces, the axe bound with rods, appealed to them not only because it was the ancient symbol of the authority of the Senate and People of Rome, in the person of the lictors, but because it contained old image of sticks, individually weak and easily broken, becoming strong and resilient when bound together*.

The trouble with this, of course, is that it doesn’t work. As this blog’s intellectual hero, Michael Oakeshott, put it,

for the most part, we pursue happiness by seeking the satisfaction of desires which spring from one another inexhaustibly. We enter into relationships of interest and of emotion, of competition, partnership, guardianship, love, friendship, jealousy and hatred, some of which are more durable than others. We make agreements with one another; we have expectations about one another’s conduct; we approve, we are indifferent and we disapprove. This multiplicity of activity and variety of opinion is apt to produce collisions: we pursue courses which cut across those of others, and we do not all approve the same sort of conduct. But, in the main, we get along with one another, sometimes by giving way, sometimes by standing fast, sometimes in a compromise. Our conduct consists of activity assimilated to that of others in small, and for the most part unconsidered and unobtrusive, adjustments.

Why all of this should be so, does not matter. It is not necessarily so. A different condition of human circumstances can easily be imagined, and we know that elsewhere and at other times activity is, or has been, far less multifarious and changeful of opinion far less diverse and far less likely to provoke collision; but, by and large, we recognize this to be our condition. It is an acquired condition, though nobody designed or specifically chose it in preference to all others. It is the product, not of “human nature” let loose, but of human beings impelled by an acquired love of making choices for themselves. And we know as little and as much about where it is leading us as we know about the fashion in hats of twenty years’ time or the design of motor-cars.

However, as Oakeshott warned — having in mind the then very recent totalitarian regimes in Italy and Germany and the still very current one in the Soviet Union –

Surveying the scene, some people are provoked by the absence of order and coherence which appears to them to be its dominant feature; its wastefulness, its frustration, its dissipation of human energy, its lack not merely of a premeditated destination but even of any discernible direction of movement. It provides an excitement similar to that of a stock-car race; but it has none of the satisfaction of a well-conducted business enterprise. Such people are apt to exaggerate the current disorder; the absence of a plan is so conspicuous that the small adjustments, and even the more massive arrangements, which restrain the chaos seem to them nugatory; they have no feeling for the warmth of untidiness but only for its inconvenience. But what is significant is not the limitations of their powers of observation, but the turn of their thoughts. They feel that there ought to be something that ought to be done to convert this so-called chaos into order, for this is no way for rational human beings to be spending their lives. Like Apollo when he saw Daphne with her hair hung carelessly about her neck, they sigh and say to themselves: “What if it were properly arranged.” Moreover, they tell us that they have seen in a dream the glorious, collisionless manner of living proper to all mankind, and this dream they understand as their warrant for seeking to remove the diversities and occasions of conflict which distinguish our current manner of living. Of course, their dreams are not all exactly alike; but they have this in a common: each is a vision of a condition of human circumstance from which the occasion of conflict has been removed, a vision of human activity co-ordinated and set going in a single direction and of every resource being used to the full. And such people appropriately understand the office of government to be the imposition upon its subjects of the condition of human circumstances of their dream. To govern is to turn a private dream into a public and compulsory manner of living. Thus, politics becomes an encounter of dreams and the activity in which government is held to this understanding of its office and provided with the appropriate instruments.

The problem is that when government that purports to not only to govern according to, but also to inculcate in those whom it governs, ‘A shared national vision’ (in the words of the report) finds this isn’t working — as, inevitably, it won’t, since we’re all of us pursuing potentially conflicting personal ends rather than (except possibly in times of all-out war) ‘a shared national vision’, and will thus inevitably come into conflict with each other — the government is at a loss to understand this. In practice, such conflicts can only be interpreted as the work of outside forces — enemies of the nation, be they foreign, or foreign-influenced, enemies if you’re one sort of totalitarian or class enemies if you’re a different, though equally nasty, flavour. Such governments can’t accept that conflict is an inevitable part of life, since they’re predicated on the idea such conflicts and collisions can be done away with — which is why, inevitably, totalitarian does end up as a synonym for repression. Conflict has to be repressed, since it’s the work of outside forces.

As I skimmed through the report, which I do intend soon to read more fully, time and again I saw individual ideas and proposals that were either unexceptionable or even rather good. But they were contained within a vision of an overarching state apparatus — and a quango, at that — that was charged not with helping people solve problems or dealing with the results when they happened but with trying to make sure that we live our lives in such a manner that the occasion for conflict won’t arise in the first place.

It will, though, as surely as night and day follow each other. And it’s what happens then that worries me, particularly if Mr Brown continues with his predecessor’s alarming delusion that all social problems can be solved by the increasingly injudicious — in the literal sense, since the government does much like getting judges involved in such matters as they notoriously ‘just don’t get it’ — use of the criminal law to solve all social ills.

Like most people, I think, I need neither a shared national vision nor a government initiative to make me do my best to get on with people, even though I may not have much in common with them nor even much like them; a combination of common decency, self-interest and inertia (since compromise is normally less effort than fighting) sees to that.      Once, though, we get a government department in charge of making us all behave well towards each other, though, then I really fear for the consequences.

*Historical footnote: This image appears in the dumb-show at the beginning of Gorboduc, the first tragedy written in blank verse in English, as I vaguely recall:

First the Music of Violins began to play, during which came in upon the Stage six wild men clothed in leaves. Of whom the first bore in his neck a fagot of small sticks, which they all both severally and together assayed with all their strengths to break, but it could not be broken by them. At the length one of them plucked out one of the sticks and broke it: And the rest plucking out all the other sticks one after another did easily break, the same being severed: which being conjoined they had before attempted in vain. After they had this done, they departed the Stage, and the Music ceased Hereby was signified, that a state knit in unity doth continue strong against all force. But being divided, is easily destroyed. As befell upon Duke Gorboduc dividing his Land to his two sons which he before held in Monarchy. And upon the dissention of the Brethren to whom it was divided.

It really is great fun; being show the ropes by an established resident, like the extremely hospitable Mr Paine, certainly helps, but it’s all pretty intuitive and before long you’re happily strolling, flying and teleporting around, just exploring this dream-like and, at times, rather surreal virtual world. I’ve succumbed to its charms, and have rented one of Mr Paine’s virtual apartments there as a base — you don’t need to do such a thing, but it’s more convenient that way and being a resident of this virtual world means you get to do many things that visitors can’t, like decorating and furnishing your apartment and start virtual businesses and so forth.

I’ve just spent a very entertaining afternoon with Mr Paine and Ruthie Zaftig, who has taken to Second Life like a duck to water, learning how to fly, sitting on the roof terrace of Tom’s (literal) castle in the air, while smoking virtual dope and eating virtual hash brownies (the last I manged to be given as free samples, during a lone exploration of some of the more disreputable neighbourhoods). We also took Ruthie on a virtual shopping expedition, from which she emerged with some shoes to die for; one of the great things about Second Life is that the exchange rate with real-world currencies is quite advantageous at the moment, so you can be absurdly generous to your friends (or at least Mr Paine can, since he’s the only one with a bank account there at the moment) for less than the price of a cup of tea.

I’ve been trying to work out what it reminded me of, and the whole thing was vaguely reminiscent of going shopping in the Moscow currency shops in the early 90s. only in this case we were, effectively, paying in black market roubles rather than valuta.

Anyway, I highly recommend giving Second Life a whirl. The software is easy enough to install on both Windows and Linux (though apparently there are supposedly some problems with Windows Vista — it does work on it, from what I read, but you may need to fiddle around with some of the Windows settings). The Linux install is a piece of cake, provided you don’t neglect to read the ‘Read Me’ text first, which tells you to ensure you’ve got the correct video drivers installed — not a problem if you haven’t, since it tells you where to get them from and they’re simple to install, too.

I really would suggest people give this strange alternative world a visit; the Blogpower awards would be a perfect opportunity, since people will know each other, or at least someone else there, or will at least know people from reading their blogs, so there will be people there to talk to. I’d suggest, though, paying a couple of visits beforehand, just to orientate yourself, play around with your appearance there (you can change your appearance, and even species, to your heart’s content), learn how to move about and so forth. My virtual residency should be set up in the next few days — when it is, I’ll post something about it and will be happy to entertain visitors there.

In this chapter, our recommendations are about:

• A shared national vision
• A national shared futures campaign
• How Local Authorities can better understand their communities and mainstream integration and cohesion
• A new performance framework Strong leadership and local democracy – including political parties acting responsibly
• How we can move away from a “one size fits all” approach

and which contains — this I’ve picked out at random — statements like

Our proposal therefore is that we use integration and cohesion policy to generate a working sense of citizenship that is based on a set of rights and responsibilities appropriate for the changing UK of the 21st century, and one that chimes at a national as well as local level.

The document proposes, among many other things, yet another Quango (don’t look so surprised),

a national body to manage the integration of new migrants, sponsored by Communities and Local Government, but independent of Government.

The authors tell us that

we see the priority actions for this body as being:

• To clarify the objectives of a strategy [...]
• To baseline the evidence: clarifying the current situation and building an evidence base [...]
• To consolidate and take forward the good practice work currently being developed [...]
• To provide guidance on how to work with settled communities in areas experiencing high levels of migration [...]
• To explore whether asking new migrants (from the EU or elsewhere) to attend the local town hall to pick up local welcome packs when they arrive might address some of the data tracking issues outlined in Chapter 7 below. This could mean not only providing the information they need at first point of contact with a local area, but could also introduce local agreements or contracts that cover behaviours, norms etc. [quoted in full]
• To secure buy-in and joined up policy making from Whitehall and the third sector: acting as a catalyst for policy development, and an independent voice both for new migrants and those settled communities experiencing rapid change. [again,quoted in full]

I don’t think they anywhere actually promise to hold seminars and deliver endless PowerPoint presentations, but I doubt these can be far from the authors’ minds.

I quote the last clauses of bureaucratic prose in full for two reasons. The first is that the BBC were actually able to persuade a spokesman for the Commission to explain a bit about these proposed local agreements or contracts that cover behaviours, norms etc.

The proposed packs are based on work by some councils to explain basic facts about British ways of life to newly-arrived migrants.”The packs might say that we like to queue at the Post Office and the bus stop and we don’t really like spitting in the street,” said a spokesman

I’m not completely sure if this spokesman is a blithering idiot or possessed of Machiavellian cunning. At first I inclined to the former view, chortling as I was about the bathos of his examples, and, indeed, their utter irrelevance; do many people find themselves beset by newly-arrived migrants jumping queues in Post Offices and spitting in the streets? Then I started having fun wondering what happened if you didn’t sign one of these patronising ‘contracts’ and wondering what else might go in them– ‘we don’t really like people chucking their empty coke cans and Macdonalds cartons in the streets or letting their dogs crap all over the pavement, either, but don’t worry … lots of people do it.’

But then I thought, ‘Hang on; he’s smuggling in, under cover of this risible example, the somewhat un-British notion that aliens have to register with the local authorities.’ I was used to having to deal with the OVIR (ОВиР, “Отдел Виз и Регистрации”, “Office of Visas and Registration”) back in Russia, but I’m a bit alarmed to see the idea brought in here, even inadvertently.

The final clause, though, really irritated me. We’re used to, I thought, and many of us are profoundly fed-up with, self-appointed ‘community spokesmen’ or ‘community leaders’. Now, here we have someone proposing ‘a national body [...], sponsored by Communities and Local Government, but independent of Government’ that will purport to act as ‘an independent voice both for new migrants and those settled communities experiencing rapid change.’

Errm… am I alone in spotting a bit of a problem with that?

For details of how to download the necessary software, register a second life account (both free) and of the bash itself, see Tom’s post here.

I’ve already filed one potential entry for next year’s competition, for the category Most Unintentionally Humorous post, but since a year’s a long time and my memory isn’t what it used to be, allow me to share it with readers right now. The back-story to this is that Jon Swift (who narrowly won the Blogpower Best North American Blog or Column, after a nail-biting photo-finish with Lord Nazh and Zaftig — many congratulations to both of them; Jon Swift is tough competition, indeed, and coming within a handful of votes of him really is an impressive feat) wrote an obituary of the late Don Herbert, an American broadcaster who was better known as Mr Wizard, the presenter of a Children’s popular science TV show.

Mr Swift, for the benefit of those who haven’t yet encountered his blog, describes himself as

a reasonable conservative who likes to write about politics and culture. Since the media is biased I get all my news from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and Jay Leno monologues

and, were it not for the fact we have his own word for it that young people

should be taught to avoid satire, which only confuses people and saps the national will. [...] While people have occasionally accused me of having a sense of humor, I strive to be funny as little as possible. I hope that, while I may occasionally slip and make an inadvertently humorous remark, for the most part what I say will be taken seriously

one might be forgiven for thinking some of his posts are a bit tongue in cheek.

One person, however, who didn’t slip into the trap of thinking Jon Swift was writing with any sense of irony when he observed that

It must have been a different world back in 1951 when his first show premiered. Can you imagine good Christian parents today allowing their children to be taught by someone who calls himself a “wizard” and tries to seduce children with the “magic” and “mystery” of science? Parents have enough problems these days trying to pry copies of the anti-Christian Harry Potter books out of their children’s little hands. Yet this man was able to go on television every week and tell children there were easy “scientific” explanations for God’s creation and that they should rely on their brains instead of the Bible.

was a Mr M, who co-writes Comments From Left Field (‘Dear Reader, Comments From Left Field is a Progressive news and opinion blog’; Mr M and his colleagues, I’m happy to note, helpfully link the word ‘blog’ in this introduction to the Wikipedia entry for the term, just in case anyone might be confused).

Having read Jon Swift’s piece, Mr M was so incensed that he wrote a scathing attack, Who The Fuck Is This Whackjob?!?!, on Mr Swift. A sample:

The piece, in its entirety, is wholely disgusting, and regressive, and I’m sorry for the invective, but it was necessary. Case in point:

As parents and their children stroll through the 60,000 sq. ft. museum, designed by a former Universal Studios exhibit director, they can see the terrible cost wrought by Mr. Wizard and other advocates of human reason: nuclear war, drug addiction, gay marriage, abortion, evolution taught in the schools, school shootings, graffiti, and carnivorous wolves. Before Eve gave Adam a bite of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, they lived peaceably with all of the animals, including dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus Rexes munched contentedly on grass and leaves, while children played with their pet velociraptors. One bite of the apple sent these loving dinosaurs into a murderous rage.

Know that my reaction to this paragraph alone was, “Holy Shit.” I mean are you kidding me? Gay marriage and teaching evolution are on par with NUCLEAR WAR? And by the way, Mr. Swift, carnivorous wolves? Most definitely one of God’s creations… not ours.

Then, just to make assurance doubly sure, he went on to Mr Swift’s blog and left a lengthy comment in a similar vein. Oops.

We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media. In our own defence, after 18 years of Opposition and the, at times, ferocious hostility of parts of the media, it was hard to see any alternative.But such an attitude ran the risk of fuelling the trends in communications that I am about to question.

and

When I fought the 1997 election – just ten years ago – we took an issue a day. In 2005, we had to have one for the morning, another for the afternoon and by the evening the agenda had already moved on,

explaining the absence with the chaste comment ‘[Party Political content].’

I was puzzled by his description of the media as ‘feral,’ a metaphor that takes us into all sorts of strange places. What sort of wild beast does he have in mind, one wonders; are the media a tiger, on whose back he has taken a ride and is now he finds it difficult to dismount, or are they savage wolves, whom he would like to domesticate into pet dogs (very loyal to their masters, dogs)? Or are they like the feral children who so worried Mr Blunkett and Mr Blair a few years ago, and who need ASBOs to sort them out? Or does he just mean the press have been beastly to him recently?

Chris, at Stumbling and Mumbling, says many of the things I would have wanted to say, only he says them better than could I, so go and read him. I particularly liked his observations that Blair rather misses the point when he says,

we need at the least a proper and considered debate about how we manage the future,

though I don’t think Chris goes far enough. He says, quite rightly,

What we need is a debate about whether we manage the future.

I’d like what seems to me the logically prior debate about whether the future is something that can be managed by us, whoever we are in this context; I’m not at all sure if Blair wanted to engage his audience of journalists in debate on how best they could join with government to manage the future, or if he was telling them that Government wanted to debate about how to undertake this remarkable project, and the press had better report these accurately, or what.

I mean, a moment’s thought tells us that the government has enough difficulty managing those aspects of the present and immediate future that are under its immediate control — junior doctors’ recruitment schemes, or Working Tax Credits or what have you — so how it hopes to manage something so — by definition — unpredictable as ‘the future’ is beyond me. And I have to say that a politician discussing how to ‘manage the future’ with a group of journalists strikes an unhappy echo; after all, Winston Smith, working at The Times, had it on the best authority that

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

Furthermore, I was struck by Mr Blair’s comment that we need this debate because

the relationship between politics, public life and the media is changing as a result of the changing context of communication in which we all operate; no-one is at fault – it is a fact; but it is my view that the effect of this change is seriously adverse to the way public life is conducted.

He goes on to explain that, because of the demands of wall-to-wall 24-hour media coverage,

The news schedule is now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It moves in real time. Papers don’t give you up to date news. That’s already out there.They have to break stories, try to lead the schedules. Or they give a commentary. And it all happens with outstanding speed. When I fought the 1997 election – just ten years ago – we took an issue a day. In 2005, we had to have one for the morning, another for the afternoon and by the evening the agenda had already moved on. You have to respond to stories also in real time.

Frequently the problem is as much assembling the facts as giving them. Make a mistake and you quickly transfer from drama into crisis. In the 1960s the government would sometimes, on a serious issue, have a Cabinet lasting two days.

It would be laughable to think you could do that now without the heavens falling in before lunch on the first day. Things harden within minutes. I mean you can’t let speculation stay out there for longer than an instant.

Now, as Chris comments,

No. The heavens wouldn’t fall in – they would appear to fall in. But then Blair has always failed to recognize this distinction. It’s led him to make hasty decisions, rather than better, longer thought-out ones.

The heavens would fall in only in the sense that there would be, at least initially, ill-digested comment about why they were taking so long to reach a decision; and I, for one, would very much welcome a brief and calm explanation from Downing Street to the effect that the matter, whatever it was, required lengthy and detailed discussion, the results of which would be announced as soon as a decision had been taken.

This seems to exemplify Blair’s complete unwillingness to take responsibility for anything, despite his mea culpa about how

We paid inordinate attention in the early days of New Labour to courting, assuaging, and persuading the media. In our own defence, after 18 years of Opposition and the, at times, ferocious hostility of parts of the media, it was hard to see any alternative.But such an attitude ran the risk of fuelling the trends in communications that I am about to question

Well, quite possibly in the early days of New Labour, such a course of action did seem, and quite probably was, necessary. It’s by no means clear to me, though, that so diligent a courting of the media remained quite so necessary after New Labour had managed to win a landslide victory with the support, God help us, of both The Sun and, rather grudgingly, the Daily Mail. Blair speaks of his concerns that

the effect of this change is seriously adverse to the way public life is conducted,

well, surely to God people in public life have at least some say over how they conduct their own affairs; if they’re unduly scared of what the papers might say about them the next morning, and allow these fears to determine their behaviour in a manner seriously adverse to the way public life is conducted, then surely they must bear some responsibility for this.

To digress, briefly, the subject of the media and the way people in public life conduct their affairs irresistibly reminds of the greatest living Conservative’s views on the behaviour of Mr Blair’s sometime Home Secretary, David Blunkett. Having rightly dismissed the complaints about the nanny’s visa and various rail tickets as pretty trivial, Boris Johnson turned to the real cause for complaint about the the Home Secretary:

While excusing the Home Secretary on these matters, we do have grave doubts about his conduct in certain other respects, not least the ruthless manner in which he decided to kiss and tell. That David Blunkett is responsible for broadcasting the details of his affair to the world there can be little doubt. Tabloids cannot publish kiss and tell stories without the co-operation of one of the parties involved, and any analysis of the quotes contained within the original story published in the News of the World in August must confirm that in this case it was Mr Blunkett who co-operated. The situation is this: he had an affair with a married woman and fathered her child. When she decided to remain with her husband, Mr Blunkett reacted like a teenage girl who finds the object of her desires wrapped around somebody else at the school bus shelter. He is an adult, and one of the most powerful politicians in the land, and yet he went bleating to the tabloid newspapers with the sole object of shocking and humiliating his lover’s husband, and destroying her marriage. After years of sucking up to the tabloid media, notably by introducing a series of illiberal Home Office measures, he was able to deploy them as weapons of revenge in his deluded amatory campaign. It is a contemptible way to behave.Such conduct seriously undermines the position of a Cabinet minister who is responsible for the law on privacy issues. How can he, or anyone else, call for restraint on the part of the tabloids, when he has blatantly blabbed? He has violated his own privacy, and violated the public’s right to be protected from the details of his private life. And above all this man – who swears that the state will not abuse ID cards – has violated the privacy of his former lover, her husband and her children. From now on the redtops will nose around our lives with utter impunity, confident that it will be impossible for the present Home Secretary to do anything to rein them in.

The point is, I think, a perfectly sound one; no one made Blunkett use the tabloid press a weapon in his personal campaign against the Quinns. That he thought it a proper thing to do, and that Mr Blair allowed him so to do, is a sad commentary, indeed, on the way public figures in Mr Blair’s government have thought it proper to behave.

It’s indeed ironic, to my mind, that, having correctly diagnosed part of the problem –

The news schedule is now 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It moves in real time. Papers don’t give you up to date news. That’s already out there.They have to break stories, try to lead the schedules. Or they give a commentary.

– Mr Blair turns his attention to the one paper he criticises by name, The Independent; this was, he says,

started as an antidote to the idea of journalism as views not news. That was why it was called the Independent. Today it is avowedly a viewspaper not merely a newspaper. The final consequence of all of this is that it is rare today to find balance in the media.

This is breath-taking. First, if I — and, I think, many others — were looking for an example of a sensationalist newspaper that

not merely elides the two[opinion and fact] but does so now as a matter of course

the dear old Indy would probably not be the first one that sprang to mind. Second, the Indy, to my mind, has deliberately become an avowed ‘viewspaper’ precisely because recognises it can’t compete as a source of immediate news with the broadcast media. I think their decision is mistaken — one of the reasons I hardly ever read the Indy nowadays is that if I want wall-to-wall comment I can get it free, and it’s usually more informative and more amusing than that found in the Indy, from some of the sources on my blogroll. But the Indy is perfectly open about what it is. So, in another way, is the Telegraph, which I read not because I particularly agree with its editorial line but because it consistently gives reasonably reliable and wide-ranging news coverage from an unashamedly right-of-centre viewpoint, which I can allow for when I’m reading it.

Pace Mr Blair, there are very few people, to my mind, who reckon, ‘I read it in the paper so it must be so.’ People recognise the biases in their newspapers; possibly they read the paper precisely because it conforms to their own prejudices — as Walter Bagehot put it,

The purchaser [of a newspaper] desires an article which he can appreciate at sight; which he can lay down and, ‘An excellent article, very excellent; exactly my own sentiments

– or possibly, like me with the Telegraph, they read it because the bias is consistent and clear, but few people (other, perhaps, than some Guardian readers) are so naive as to think their paper does not have an axe to grind.

What is Mr Blair’s solution to this? Why, regulation, of course;

As the technology blurs the distinction between papers and television, it becomes increasingly irrational to have different systems of accountability based on technology that no longer can be differentiated in the old way.How this is done is an open question and, of course, the distinction between balance required of broadcasters but not of papers remains valid. But at some point the system is going to change and the importance of accuracy will not diminish, whilst the freedom to comment remains.

It is sometimes said that the media is accountable daily through the choice of readers and viewers. That is true up to a point. But the reality is that the viewers or readers have no objective yardstick to measure what they are being told. In every other walk of life in our society that exercises power, there are external forms of accountability, not least through the media itself.

Oh dear, oh dear. Quite apart from the chaos Mr Blair and his government have wrought with their objective yardsticks, in the form of performance indicators and what have you, in just about every sphere they’ve introduced the damn things, Mr Blair thinks that we, the readers and viewers, are too naive to be trusted to form our own judgments about the reliability, accuracy or bias of what we read and see, so, instead, we need the government to provide us with a properly objective view of events , backed up by the force of law.

Don’t think so, thanks.

Reports that U.S. President George W. Bush had his wristwatch stolen while shaking hands with Albanians on his weekend visit are false, Albanian police and the U.S. embassy said on Tuesday.”The story is untrue and the president did not lose his watch,” a spokesman for the embassy in Tirana said.

Some newspapers, television stations and websites carried reports that Bush’s watch vanished on Sunday when he was greeted by ecstatic crowds in Fushe Kruje, outside the capital Tirana.

“It is not true,” said Albania’s police director, Ahmet Prenci.

Photographs showed Bush, surrounded by five bodyguards, putting his hands behind his back so one of the bodyguards could remove his watch.

Well, Boing Boing provides a link to a Dutch TV station whose video certainly appears to show a watch on President Bush’s wrist when his arm disappears into a crowd of Albanian well-wishers and no watch thereon when his arm reappears a few seconds later — take a look at the video here, and see what you think (the article’s in Dutch, but the video speaks for itself).

I can see it’s a bit embarrassing for everyone that his watch was pinched — rather spoils the initial impression given by his rapturous reception, and doesn’t really reflect well on the Albanians, tending, as it does, to confirm various Mail and Express stereotypes.

However, I’m not sure that the alternative explanation — that President Bush took one look at the crowd and hissed to his security men, ‘For God’s sake, take this watch off my wrist or the buggers’ll steal it, as sure as eggs is eggs’ — sounds much better.

Update: This seems to be rather contentious, and the plot appears to be thickening. Bruce Schneier has a link to a clip, shot from a different angle, which appears — though this disputed by several people commenting at Mr Schneier’s blog — to show President Bush removing his watch himself, presumably because people have been trying to steal it from his wrist. But other links in Mr Schneier’s blog have accounts of how the President’s watch apparently fell to the ground and was then retrieved by security staff.

I’d be convinced by the film of the President removing his watch himself if weren’t for the initial stories having him putting his hands behind his back so his bodyguards could remove the watch for him — seems a convoluted way of doing it, and you’d have thought that, ‘No, the President took his own watch off’ would have been a far better thing to have said, particularly if it were true. Unless it’s somehow against professional etiquette for White House Press Officers to tell the whole, unvarnished truth in any circumstances, no matter how trivial, since that could set a dangerous precedent.

Anyway, I’m not up to arguing about such matters, so if anyone does wish to explain what they think happened, please do it at Bruce Schneier’s place rather than here.

Meanwhile, James Higham quite sensible demands to know,

Are we going to stand for this? Are we just going to sit back while thieves and conjurers hijack the airwaves and hold us all to ransome [Arthur]? I say we act:

NOW!

Second Update: The BBC has an interview (plus video) with a street magician explaining how magicians (and pickpockets) can snaffle your watch without you noticing — keeping it on a vecro strap is apparently a recommended precaution, because of the noise it makes when he tries to undo the strap, though it probably isn’t much use when you’re dealing with an adulatory mob of yelling Albanians, as happens to me all the time.

a new book soon to be serialised by The Mail on Sunday – The Darlings Of Downing Street by Garry O’Connor,

so it’s almost certainly untrue,

Mr Blair is reported as asking his confidant Father Timothy: “Would this be possible?” He was told: “It usually takes two or three years”, to which he replied: “The fact that I’m PM, could this make a difference?”

Bel’s looked up the qualifications for becoming a deacon and, probably by some oversight, being a former Prime Minister doesn’t appear to be among them, Anyway, you can read more of this in Bel’s excellent blog.

For my part, I was struck by the way Fr Russ seems to have mellowed; it was only in 2004 that he was being spectacularly indiscreet and not at all complimentary about Mr Blair. Then the Telegraph was reporting that

Fr Russ, the parish priest of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in nearby Missenden, Berks, told a newspaper that Mr Blair had raised the issue of conversion over lunch.”When he asked me, it was in the abstract,” the priest said. “It wasn’t, ‘Can I become a Catholic?’ but, ‘Can the Prime Minister of Britain be a Catholic?’ He said Mr Blair would be “freer to consider the matter” after he had left office. “But even if he resigns or whatever, I doubt he has the ‘necessary’ to join the Catholic Church.

“It is always a work of grace,” said Fr Russ.

“He would probably have a lot going for him, but he also has to change a lot.”

Mind you, Fr Russ’s judgement seems slightly questionable; at the same time, he was telling The Guardian, of Mr Blair,

“He’s a good person and he’s very concerned about humanity. And whether he becomes a Catholic or not, I think he’ll use his position to do something constructive, perhaps in Palestine. He’s got integrity and I can’t see him doing what other former prime ministers doing and going on lecture tours of America.

“It’s not a question of whether he becomes a Catholic but a question of where his conscience leads him.”

His announcement of his candidacy possibly gives a flavour of why he’s in the first category, and this exchange with someone rash enough to argue with him gives a good idea of why he’s doing well in the second.

Well worth a read.

Inspired by his example, I’ve tried to put my blogroll onto Bloglines in a similar manner. I find that it’s a lot easier to skim them in a reader like that than it is to visit individual links, so I’m rather hoping that people who’ve vaguely wondered what such-and-such a blog on my blogroll is about, but have never bothered to go there — I rarely explore people’s blogrolls in any great detail, I must admit — might take a quick look at unfamiliar titles via Mr Paine’s and my online feed readers and perhaps find a couple of unfamilar blogs they find interesting.